The First Xanadu Proposal, 1966
This is historically interesting on a number of levels--
about hypertext, word processing, Xanadu,
and personal computing-- twenty years
before the personal computer.
The paper was a proposal to Bill Jovanovich, my boss--
he and I had gone together to see Engelbart.
Engelbart was wonderful, and I was converted to the mouse,
but the other ideas here were my own.
And this may be the first description ever
of an easy-to-use word processor,
though that term did not exist.
What I really wanted was a lab
to develop hypertext and graphics,
and I believed it could all be done on the
Digital Equipment 338.
While the thinking is clear and the proposal
is straightforward,
I vastly underestimated the scope of the project.
Naturally it was doomed-- Harcourt
was an IBM shop and in corporate politics
your enemy is the other department--
no way would the department
(or the IBM sales team) allow a rival's equipment
into the corporation.
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